Around this time of year, Christmas and holiday card orders start coming in. Along with party invitations and envelopes, these holiday season items keep us quite busy into the New Year!

Many of our clients trust us to design, print, cut, score and fold their holiday cards and party invitations year after year. (Many also count on us to address envelopes and handle the mailing services.) These clients value the satisfaction they get from sending out an original, attractive looking piece of art to friends and family each year. With all the cookie-cutter card templates out there (you’ll probably have a few cards with the same lame Shutterfly layout sitting above your fireplace this year), it’s no surprise that many people prefer to create custom cards. Can you blame them for trying to look like they actually care?

Now that December is almost here, Christmas and holiday card design orders are filling our pipeline. It’s the perfect time for you to get going on your 2017 card. We offer very fast turnaround times, so it’s never too late.

But what should your card look like this year? Remember, most people display all the cards they receive in plain view throughout the holiday season, so why not create something thoughtful and different this year? Below are a few ideas that might help you think about how to create the perfect holiday card.

Hand-drawn artwork

Have you or your kids created anything special this year? Perhaps a cute drawing or painting? No matter what size it is, we can take that special artwork and make it the centerpiece of your holiday card.

Personalization

If you can create a mailing list in Excel with different fields in each column of your spreadsheet, you can easily personalize your holiday cards. Custom greetings and salutations (anything really) are possible with variable data. When your recipients open your custom printed envelopes to find a holiday card that was created especially for them, they’ll definitely see the effort you have made to make them feel special.

Photo-Retouching

You have a photo you want to use for your card, but it needs some help to get it ready for public disclosure. Our designers are Photoshop experts who can edit your photo as you wish — such as by removing a person, adding a special background, or simply retouching to remove imperfections.

We’ve added a new cutter to our equipment lineup. What the Roland GS-24 allows us to do is create custom-cut vinyl and other materials — and since this neat machine is under our roof, custom-cut vinyl is now on our growing list of same-day services.

Screen printing is a bit different. It’s hardly printing at all. This method involves pressing ink through a screen that has been prepped to act like a stencil. Some areas of the screen are blocked, preventing ink to penetrate and creating the design pattern.

Why would you choose one method over the other? Here are a couple of the major issues:

Color printing

While it is possible to do multi-color printing with screen printing, to do so requires a screen to be made for each color to be used in the design. Each color is then “printed” separately. Three colors = three screens = three prints per garment.

With DTG, you can print millions of colors. Ink is mixed in the printhead and all colors are printed at the same time, without the need to do color separations or create separate screens.

If you have a full color photograph that you’d like to print on a garment, this cannot be done using the screen printing method. It simply must be done DTG.

Small batches, short runs

With screen printing, each color to be printed requires a screen to be made. So, for example, to print an American flag, you would create a screen for the red content and a screen for the blue content. If you were printing on a white shirt, you could use the white of the shirt for the stars and white stripes. If you were printing on a black or other colored shirt, you would need to create a third screen for the stars and white stripes. At $30 per screen on average, your first t-shirt would already cost $90, before the print process has begun!

With DTG, there are no screens to create. The design, no matter how complicated, can be printed as-is, straight from design software. This makes it possible to create the first shirt for the same cost as the 2nd and so on. That’s why with DTG there are no minimums. Prices generally decrease as quantity goes up (see our DTG pricing here), but short runs are not cost-prohibitive.

So…

For full-color printing, you simply have to go with DTG. Same thing for designs that are customized for the user, such as adding names, titles or different content. For 1, 2, 3 or even 4 color printing, there may be a sweet spot (likely between 50-100 garments) where it could make sense to switch to screen printing.

Update: we’ve made some changes in our online shop as of September 2017 — including reducing the number of products, limiting materials options, and eliminating many custom options — so it’s now back in action. (We decided to leave this post up because it’s worth a read.)

Well, we finally ditched our e-commerce platform. After several years of growth in transactions conducted entirely through our website, we analyzed the most important issues surrounding web-to-print with our business and decided to make a change.

What we found is that web-to-print brings the potential to produce weak customer satisfaction numbers. Poorly designed art, the wrong colors, incorrect materials … basically bad customer choices. It wasn’t that our customers were unhappy with their projects. It was that we weren’t able to help improve them. They could have been better. The e-commerce process essentially took our staff OUT of the design/print process, and this impacted overall job quality enough for us to make this change.

So for now we’re going to wait and see what happens with e-commerce and web-to-print. Until someone comes up with a better system — a system that incorporates all the paper stocks, weights and finishes that we carry; one that properly prices design time, custom sizes, unique finishing requirements, etc.; and one that helps each customer choose the right materials and configuration for their specific needs — we’re going back to assisting each customer directly with their unique projects. Yes… interaction and collaboration has beaten out automation, for now.

We can still do all the back-and-forth online — requests/files/inquiries can be sent to info@kkpdc.com or you can even open a chat session to start the process — but to get a project finished here you’ll have to deal with us humans for the foreseeable future. Of course you can pay online but you’re stuck with getting personalized service!

Your odds of creating a great project actually just went way up. Sorry!

When you need 10, 50, 100, 250 custom labels printed today, you are in luck. (Of course if you need 1000+, we can do this too.)

The labels we stock are squares/rectangles with 0.125″ rounded corners as well as ovals/circles in white gloss. Matte and transparent stock can be custom ordered for you. You can find the various sizes and shapes we keep in stock on this page.

You should be able to get online quotes, place your label order and upload art for same-day printing soon.

With DTG, it’s all about printing on certain sections of a garment. We create these printable areas with platens. Platens are devices we use to position a garment under the printer’s printhead in such a way that there is a flat unobstructed surface to print on.

In addition to front, back, short sleeve and neck areas… we now can now print:

Full-color digitally-printed t-Shirts. Graphics on front side, back side or both. Available in various colors, short-sleeve, long-sleeve, tank-top, more. If your design is ready to print (or we can put the elements together for you), this is a same-day service.

CustomInk’s typical turnaround is 2 weeks. A rush order with them is 1 week. Really? Sorry, but if I want a new t-shirt, I’d like it today.

We just printed this set of 3 different t-shirts for a client in less than 30 minutes.

You ready to get going? There are NO minimums… print 1 t-shirt if you like. Note: you’ll pay less if you order more.

Submit camera-ready art or we can design for you. If you provide imagery, text and guidance, most t-shirt designs are $30 or less.

Visit our shop to purchase white t-shirts online. We keep these in stock and can print them in MINUTES.

For dark garments, pricing may differ depending on ink coverage. Visit this page and complete the form at the bottom.

Our new Konica 1085 digital press takes printing on heavy cover stock to the next level. This new machine prints 130# cover stock (130lb, 130 pound, 350gsm) on both sides, fast. For some people, 130# cover is overkill for a business card. Others like their cards very thick. You know which camp you’re in.

What this means is that with KKP you can have 130lb double sided full color business cards printed faster than you can say “thick business cards please”. Yes, this is a same day service here. You need your thick business cards yesterday? They’re ready, pick ’em up already. Try asking FedEx Office or Staples for this and after the initial blank stare they’ll figure out how to get them to you in about a week! Pretenders!

Give us a call to get pricing, or you can also find these in our online shop.

We don’t announce every new piece of equipment we buy, but this particular acquisition is too neat to put into service without at least mentioning it in a blog post and highlighting how it improves our workflow and the quality of our finished products.

Over the holidays we were happy to welcome the newest piece of finishing equipment in our shop — a Triumph 5560 programmable paper cutter. Perhaps you saw it going into our building in Cady’s Alley via crane on 12/21! This cutter makes finishing perfectly cut pieces so much easier. And while of course we’ve had nice paper cutters over the years, this one is quiet an upgrade. Have a look to the right and you’ll notice a few special things about this cutter. First, and foremost, it’s highly programmable. The electronic display not only allows us to input and save custom jobs with multiple automatic cuts; it also shows the exact dimension of each cut right down to hundredths of an inch. That’s incredibly precise, by the way. Next, you’ll notice there is no retractable safety glass on this cutter. The Triumph 5560 actually has sensors which prevent the blade from coming down while hands or anything are near, so no glass is necessary. This speeds up the cutting process immensely. The blade itself is an incredible display of quality, machined cutting prowess. And with the red LED optical cutting line you can see in the photo, there’s never a doubt that the next cut will be right on the mark.

So when you need invitations cut to precisely fit into envelopes, or menus that have to be a special size to fit into sleeves, or anything that must be cut EXACTLY to size, give us a call.